jankp's Full Review: Salman Rushdie et al - The Satanic Verses
All those things you will get in this wildly clever fictive extravaganza, but not a sole thing, in my opinion, that warrants a death sentence for the Persian author Salman Rushdie. Why then in 1989 did the evil-personified Ayotollah Kohmeini (spelling?) issue the call for his death to the whole world? Was the novel making fun of him personally or of Allah (the Islamic God)? Did it have Satan-worshipping witches in it or glorify evil and violence shamelessly with soulless, unredeemable characters he refused to relate to?
No, dear reader, I don’t believe so, but I’ll tell you what the novel does have going for it. The two main characters (protagonists) are beautiful examples of not heroes, but antiheroes, the enigmatic writer’s creation that Hemingway had such affinity for. That, however, does not correlate to a boring novel. Not at all!
It simply means that Rushdie’s protagonists are weak in character, as opposed to being weakly characterized. We see their fears (paranoia schizophrenia actually), their dishonesty (even to each other and themselves) and their lack of nobility or strength of character. It might not be a pretty picture, but it was real and totally human. They are enemies, perhaps, if we listen to them, but are they not more of their own worst… nemesis?
The Satanic Verses is also about dreams wrought from mental illness and a consuming hatred and jealousy. Gibreel Farishta is the one diagnosed with paranoia schizophrenia who believes he is an archangel that gives messages to his dreamed-up prophets. In one dream (extending over two, not continual, chapters), this unpopular prophet of the one God betrays his followers by declaring he had heard his angel tell him to accept three other gods of the land. Suspicion of the reality of the angel leads the prophet’s scribe, by the author’s name of Salman no less, to start changing a word here and there of the prophetic message. His ‘satanic verses’ aren’t found out and he, a ‘drunken chatterbox’, freaks out. Eventually, though, the prophet Mahound uncovers the traitor and Salman must go into hiding, just as the author had to do after the Ayotollah’s proclamation!
The other antihero, Saladin Chamcha, nicknamed ‘Spoono’ by Farishta for his becoming an Englishman, is so eaten up with jealousy and hatred of the megamoviestar Farishta that after their plane crashes and they survive being hostages, Saladin is corrupted by the evil in him, which transforms him into a devil-goat. Obviously he is very sick to dream this, but the author never lets us know this, unlike when Gibreel dreams and the author points it out flatly towards the middle of the book. When Saladin lets go of his hatred, he becomes normal again.
Now you’ve heard just a little bit of the book. I haven’t even mentioned the women in their lives, one who committed suicide over Gibreel and whose ghost is persecuting him throughout and Saladin’s pregnant wife who believed he died in the crash and has taken a lover. In fact jealousy of another man pushes the crazy Gibreel over the edge at the end. No longer a successful moviestar and condemned to either sedative drugs or mental hallucinations, he actually seeks help from Saladin back home in India as a last, pitiful resort.
Final Thoughts
This was a mesmerizing experience through the eyes of characters wondering if they are good or evil, an archangel or a devil. Their lives change drastically because of the plane crash, which makes them very confused, another aspect of the antihero. I found myself rather impatient when Rushdie would leave me hanging with one character to introduce another because I didn’t see the connection yet and there were so many supporting players to keep track of. It’s a huge hardcover of 547 pages and nine chapters, fraught with the occasional page of about one monster sentence and another smaller one! I wouldn’t call it The Sound And The Fury by Faulkner, but sometimes the sentences and some no paragraph pages were marathon events.
Ultimately it is a book of change. Nothing and no one stays the same, so boredom shouldn’t be a problem for you if you decide to check it out. Truly the novel tickled my funny bone with great consistency. Rushdie directly speaks to his readers at one point, but usually his description or dialogue set me off, like in another of Gibreel’s dreams, a prophetess is tempted to abandon her pilgrimage with her followers to the Arabian Sea after a flood descends on them from the sky and she rejects it, saying it was of the devil. A criticizer notes then, “So we’re between the devil and the deep blue sea.”
I’m glad I read it. I’ve never read anything similar, that’s for sure! I doubt you have, either. It doesn’t matter if you’re Islamic, I think, unless you take novels as seriously as the Koran like, I guess, the Ayotollah and other radical Muslims do still today. I read that Rushdie, hiding out in London, has a cameo in the movie Bridget Jones’ Diary. Hopefully the world of not just writers will become more and more aware of his terrible situation and help him become free from being hunted down at last.
Read this for the right to freedom of speech. Read this for the exhilarating experience…
…he seemed able to think of these nightshows as separate from himself, which gave Allie and the Maudsley psychiatrists the feeling that Gibreel was slowly reconstructing the boundary wall between dreams and reality, and was on the road to recovery; whereas in fact, as it turned out, this separation was related to, was the same phenomenon as, his splitting of his sense of himself into two entities, one of which he sought heroically to suppress, but which he also, by characterizing it as other than himself, preserved, nourished, and secretly made strong.
As for Allie, she lost, for a while, the prickly, wrong feeling of being stranded in a false milieu, an alien narrative; caring for Gibreel, investing in his brain, as she put it to herself, fighting to salvage him so that they could resume the great, exciting struggle of their love…pp 340-1
Strong women, weak men? Hmm. No wonder I enjoyed the trip so much!
Muze: Copyright 1995 - 2008 Muze Inc. For personal non-commercial use only. All rights reserved.
Epinions.com periodically updates pricing and product information from third-party sources, so some information may be slightly out-of-date. You should confirm all information before relying on it.
- Add to My Yahoo!: 
- Add to Google Homepage: 
© 1999-2008 Shopping.com, Inc.